Creative: Best Practices Between a Catalog Company and Its Creative Agency

Catalogers who outsource their catalog creative and production often ask themselves the following questions:

*How can we work together better?

*How can we build a smoother creative process for our catalog?

*How can we control our schedule and creative budget better?

*How can we produce a better and more compelling catalog?

*How can we be more consistent in our creative presentation to customers?

*How can our catalog enhance the company’s niche and brand better?

The road to building and maintaining a smooth relationship between a catalog company and its creative agency is often marred with pitfalls. Here are some best practices for building and maintaining a harmonious, mutually respectful relationship between these two entities.

1. Creative Process

It’s important to have a creative process that both parties agree to, and then follow it. Catalog marketing is a broad process that can be broken into sub-processes covering creative, marketing, circulation, merchandising, fulfillment and more. A process is a system that takes into account technological changes, approvals and alterations, and then assigns responsibility for those duties. Mutual respect and improved working relationships start with both teams, the cataloger and the agency, agreeing to and following a process.

2. Realistic Schedule

Too many times schedules are very loose, or they’re woefully short in adequate time to produce a quality catalog. Successful catalog creative teams build a schedule working backward from the catalog’s in-home date and then allowing proper time for printing/binding/mailing, pre-press, creative design, photography, copywriting and page production.

Everyone must have access to and agree to the schedule upfront. Include merchandising team members in the schedule approval and buy-in. They’re the ones who kick off the schedule. If multiple catalogs are planned for a season, multiple (i.e., many times overlapping) schedules are needed.

3. The Budget

From having spent nearly 20 years on the profit and loss side of cataloging, I know that catalog managers hate surprises. Nothing can cool a relationship faster than a creative project that comes in 20 percent or 25 percent more than budget. Successful long-term relationships are built on trust and value. A cataloger is willing to outsource the creative execution because the creative agency has expertise, can meet budgets and schedules, and provides a value-added service that’s hard to reproduce inside.

Smart agencies espouse the following:

* having a formal budget with client sign-off;

* documenting and having approved changes to the budget assumptions (e.g., number of pages, product or price changes, change in catalog specifications);

* maintaining a good daily/weekly communication by talking about changes and agreeing how to handle them.

4. Knowledgeable Catalog Agency

At the heart of the issue is identifying the right creative agency in the first place. General agencies that rarely work on catalog projects may salivate when asked to bid or pitch a catalog project. They see huge dollar signs, and catalogs look so simple. But by identifying upfront the following red flags you can eliminate pretenders in your search for the right agency.

* Does the agency know cataloging?

* Does it have experience, and can it demonstrate and discuss with you some best catalog-creative practices for your book?

* Does the agency have familiarity with your industry segment? (Major differences exist between catalogs that sell food, apparel and business-related merchandise.)

* Can the agency show you recent samples of its work that demonstrate its expertise?

5. Collegial Atmosphere

Catalogers like to employ agencies they admire, that are competent, provide good value and are enjoyable with which to work. Having fun while producing good results is a benchmark for long-term success.

Building lasting relationships doesn’t happen by chance. Both you and your creative agency need to work at the process and produce an atmosphere that’s mutually respectful and produces good value for the money spent.

Jack Schmid is found of J. Schmid & Associates, a Shawnee Mission, Kan.-based catalog consultancy. You can reach him at (913) 236-8988, or e-mail jacks@jschmid.com